I am an Assistant Professor at the Department of Science & Technology Studies at Cornell University with a graduate field appointment in Information Science. Broadly based in science and technology studies, ethnography, and public policy, my research revolves around the practicalities of valuation, governance, and accountability in digitally networked environments — the dynamics at work, the values at stake, the design options at hand.

In my recent work, I have been looking at the practical politics of novel review, rating, and ranking schemes in healthcare and search engine optimization (SEO). I am especially interested in the everyday work of establishing, maintaining, and subverting these schemes and how new practices of evaluation challenge our understanding of care, accountability, and governance.

I have also been interested in algorithmic ordering; the history and performativity of internet governance; the nature and uses of "crowd wisdom" in regulation; and computational approaches to privacy. As Principal Investigator, I headed the ESRC-funded How's My Feedback? project, a collaborative design experiment to rethink and evaluate online review and rating websites.

Current projects & fieldwork

Feedback Stories: What does it takes to capture the experiences of users and make them useful for improving care? This project explores how public reviews govern public services, using the example of the British healthcare system. Based on long-term fieldwork with Patient Opinion, a not-for-profit social enterprise that set out to change the National Health Service (NHS) through web-based patient feedback, I follow stories from the beds and living rooms of patients through the database and moderation systems back into the wards and offices of hospitals and trusts. Attending to how stories do their work in different settings and situations, I develop a novel way of thinking not only about claims about accountability, transparency, and participation, but also about the status of experience as a key trope in contemporary governance.

Shadow Cultures: My second project explores the work of search engine optimization (SEO) consultants. How do these professionals makes sense of a technology often thought of as inscrutable? How is the line between legitimate optimization and illegitimate manipulation drawn in practice? And how does the presence of seemingly omnipotent corporation reconfigure the relations of governance and accountability among webmasters, marketers, users, designers, and technology? In order to answer these questions, I have been interning at an SEO agency, attending industry conferences, taking part in SEO trainings, following public outcries and scandals over search rankings.

How's My Feedback?: This was an ESRC-funded collaborative design experiment to rethink and evaluate web-based review and rating schemes. Specifically, we brought together users, designers, managers, critics, and regulators of review and rating schemes to design a feedback website for feedback websites.

“What is it with experience? Postings, governance and multiplicity in web-based patient feedback,” Knowledge, Innovation and E-health Research Group Seminar, Warwick Medical School, United Kingdom, March 2, 2011

“Researching search: Ethnographic stories from the search marketing industry,” Business School, University of Exeter, United Kingdom, February 2, 2011

“How to attend to screens? Mundane encounters at the int(er/ra)face,” PhD Workshop “Framing Screens: Knowledge, Interaction, Practice”, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark, September 29, 2010

“‘This is not science’: A student’s experience of STS practices at Oxford”, Workshop on Practices of Science and Technology Studies: Reflexive Takes on Cross-context Collaboration, Graduate University of Advanced Studies, Tokyo, Japan, August 24, 2010

“Innovation in governance as a practical accomplishment,” First Berlin Forum Innovation in Governance, Technical University Berlin, Germany, May 20, 2010

Traffic lights, elevators, and recycling bins seem rather boring and irrelevant. Yet, while not usually on our minds when thinking about governance and regulation, these seemingly mundane technologies are important features of our lives. This course will take a closer look at everyday solutions to public problems. Combining hands-on exercises with readings from STS, sociology, and politics, we shall explore the role of everyday devices and technologies in establishing, maintaining, and disrupting social order. How to think about these “small” solutions to “big” problems? What are tools and tricks for analyzing things we take for granted? How might these insights challenge longstanding ideas about accountability, technology, and governance? Working through these questions will be particularly useful for students interested in sociology, design, and public policy.

Computers are powerful tools for working, playing, thinking, and living. Laptops, PDAs, webcams, cell phones, and iPods surround us. They are not just devices. They also provide narratives, metaphors, and ways of seeing the world. Computers have a long history in the workplace but, in the last 20 years, they have also become inextricably bound up in all aspects of our everyday lives. This generation of college students is the first for whom instant messaging, mobile phones, and on-line networking are a normal and an essential part of social life. How are the lives of people in the United States and elsewhere changing, for better and for worse, with these technologies? What cultural trends and political forces do they embody? And how could we design, engage, use, or not use them in ways that improve our lives and our societies?

STS 4561 - Evaluation and Society

Syllabus coming soon! | Cross-listed as SOC 4560, INFO 4561

Evaluation is a pervasive feature of contemporary life. Professors, doctors, countries, hotels, pollution, books, intelligence: there is hardly anything that is not subject to some form of review, rating, or ranking these days. This senior seminar examines the practices, cultures, and technologies of evaluation and asks how value is established, maintained, compared, subverted, resisted, and institutionalized in a range of different settings. Topics include user reviews, institutional audit, ranking and commensuration, algorithmic evaluation, tasting, gossip, and awards. Drawing on case studies from science, technology, culture, accounting, art, environment, and everyday life, we shall explore how evaluation comes to order our lives – and why it is so difficult to resist.

Valuation is a pervasive feature of contemporary life. Professors, universities, hotels, markets, movies, user experience, intelligence: almost everything is subject to some form of review, rating, or ranking these days. This course examines valuation as a key techno-scientific practice and asks how value is established, maintained, compared, subverted, resisted, and institutionalized in a range of different settings. Through a mix of reading, writing, and practical exercises, we shall engage with theoretical, historical, and ethnographic studies of (e)valuation in science & technology studies, but also draw on related areas like economic sociology, the sociology of evaluation, accounting studies, anthropology, and information science.